No idea System wobble

[Poag]

My turn to ask for input.


Recently I've been having lots of trouble with my PC. It started off with USB devices randomly powering off and requiring to be unplugged and plugged back in again to bring them back to life. In the middle of a tank battle in BF3 this is not a good thing.


So USB devices were powering off. I decided to give it the old reinstall route to see what would happen. Reinstalled Windows, all was good for maybe 3 days, now the PC is highly unstable. Reseting randomly at first, with about 5-15 mins play time between.
Seems to have calmed down again recently with no problems over the weekend until last night when it randomly powered off again.


I'm in two minds about what the problem could be. First, PSU is dieing. Its a Thermaltake 2008 model, so 4 years old and has seen some fairly heavy usage over the years. This would explain both the USB devices powering off and the system instability.

Second, mobo/cpu dieing/faulty. Either power management is gone mental, the controllers are fried (previously my PC was very hot, bought a new case and moved the bits over to bring down the temp to about 60'c (cpu) from 80 ish.) Both are a couple of years old, its an i5 760 and a Asus P7P55D-.


I'm in two minds about what to do. Either A, try and resolve the issue one part at a time, probably end up replacing them all in the end as they could all be suspect really.

B- replace them all in one go and upgrade the PC at the same time.



For A, it would be, replace PSU, then mobo/cpu, then ram. I'm concerned about this route as the PSU may have jazzed the mobo with wonkey power. Cost being £90 -> £189+£83 if i need a new mobo aswell.

For B, it would be a new Z77-D3H, i5 3750K and a Antec 650w Truepower. Total cost, £374


So i'm asking for thoughts on possible theories, my theories, and the two options.

 

[Raven]

Sounds like a PSU problem or a MOBO power management issue. I doubt any of the symptoms could be caused by anything else failing.

The cheapest to test first would be the PSU, as the other option is building a new PC then you may as well get the PSU now.

 

[MYstIC G]

Definitely sounds like flakey power. Do as Raven suggests mate.

 

[Poag]

Yeah got a PSU on order, wondered if anyone had had this problem previously and could say for sure.

 

[cHodAX]

It's much more likely to be a chipset or power management problem on the motherboard sadly, power would drop from hard drives and graphics long before they would drop from USB if it was a power supply issue, mainly because they are the biggest offboard consumers of power. You would notice right away if those were being starved of power. So I would strongly suspect a problem on the motherboard itself and the chipset controlling the USB ports is most likely, when that starts to fail you would get the system instability you mentioned because that chipset also handles a number of other important system functions. Whatever you do, don't go and buy an expensive powersupply to test the theory of those above, either loan one from a friend or get a shop to run a fault diagnosis for you.

 

[Bahumat]

Yeah got a PSU on order, wondered if anyone had had this problem previously and could say for sure.

Remember all the weird shit I had with my pc and the psu fixed it? If temperatures are fine and if the issues occur outside of games (kinda ruling out gfx) then all fingers point to psu.

Check event viewer and see what it says

 

[Bahumat]

cHodAX has a point, but a four year old psu would have lost some power so would need replacing anyway

 

[Poag]

So the new PSU arrived last night. I spent an hour taking the old one out, cleaning, installing the new one and doing the cabling in a semi decent fashion.

Left it to settle for 30 mins while I ate then booted up BF3....15 mins later PC reset itself, annoyed I went and sat and watched TV for 10 mins.

Came back to the PC and played BF for a couple of hours without reset, did turn off Fraps, but I highly doubt that was causing hard resets.

WTF?

 

[cHodAX]

Almost certainly a chipset issue I am afraid, you need to get it tested properly by someone with diagnostics.

 

[Poag]

Decided to go the whole hog line and ordered a new mobo and cpu.

3570K and a Z77-D3H, will reuse my current RAM for now. £265 delivered tomorrow, hopefully my current 1156 cooler will fit on a 1155 socket, not sure I have all the fittings for it anymore after the move :s